DENVER (AP) – A federal jury on Monday found a man guilty of murder for pushing his wife to her death off a cliff as they hiked in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park to celebrate their wedding anniversary, rejecting his claim that her fall was a tragic accident.
It took the jury about 10 hours to find Harold Henthorn, 59, guilty of first-degree murder in the death of his second wife, a wealthy Mississippi native. She died after plummeting about 130 feet off a cliff in a remote, rocky area where the couple had been hiking on Sept. 29, 2012, their 12th wedding anniversary.
Henthorn told investigators that his wife paused to take photo of the view and fell face-first over the ledge. His attorney, Craig Truman, said prosecutors failed to prove he killed her.
But prosecutors argued during a two-week trial that Henthorn carefully staged Toni Henthorn’s death to look like an accident because he stood to benefit from her $4.7 million in life insurance policies, which she didn’t know existed. They seized on Harold Henthorn’s inconsistent accounts of the fatal fall and said the evidence did not match his shifting stories.
Harold Henthorn scouted the remote area of the popular park 75 miles north of Denver nine times before bringing his wife with him. He was searching for the “perfect place to murder someone,” where there would be no witnesses and no chance of her surviving, prosecutor Suneeta Hazra said.